The Ultimate Guide to High Availability with MariaDB
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Paybox Services Deploys MariaDB

Paybox Services is one of the major players in the market for online payment solutions in France. They have recently chosen the services of SkySQL Ab, and their team deployed MariaDB as the database of choice.

Paybox Services has a secure payment platform that accepts transactions via multiple channels, such as payment terminals, the Internet, mobile transactions, IVR-based transactions and even from call centres. Paybox has over 16,000 merchants, has a 25% market share of all e-commerce transactions in France and handles in excess of 110 million transactions per year.

Speaking to Stephane Varoqui, Principal Consultant, Professional Services at SkySQL France, we learned that three MariaDB servers are used in a production capacity, post-migration from MySQL 5.1. There is also one testing server. This is deployed on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0, with MariaDB 5.2.4 replication preview, using the XFS filesystem.

Several reasons why Paybox picked MariaDB:

  • Group commit with sync_binlog = 1
  • Logical backups that do not stall with start transaction with consistent snapshot
  • Ability to have multiple transactional storage engines
  • PBXT looks better in this 60% write workload. The availability of choice here helps. (The architecture uses non-ordered PK sequences built with a unique server ID that forces us to embed date and time fields in the first position of the PK making all secondary indexes bigger then what is necessary)
  • MyISAM is used tables for GIS indexes and quadratic searches
  • The optimizer refactoring that MariaDB is taking care of deserves credit and will be a great help when 5.3 will be ready on the back office databases

Migrations are of course never without problems. There are features that Paybox still wants in MariaDB, including semi-sync replication and the dictionary lock during filesystem operations like partition drop, which are currently present in MySQL 5.5. However, SkySQL spent six-months in development time, and it took about one week to make it production ready, and now Paybox is a happy user of MariaDB, and a happy customer of SkySQL.

References

  • press release
  • SkySQL Consulting provides a window of quality time to focus on all database topics, including: hardware & OS upgrade and tuning policy, database upgrade policy, online maintenance tasks, monitoring tools analysis, security compliance, query reviews, architecture proposals and storage engine QA
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